Description

About the Book:

Henry and Harriette: Diaries of an enduring odyssey

The life of an Irish field geologist and his family during the nineteenth century.

We know Henry’s scientific achievements – but this book reveals the man behind them, and the lively family life he shared with his wife Harriette and their eight children. Based on the diaries they kept for over fifty years, it paints a vivid picture of a busy household whose contacts extended beyond the local doctor, parson, business people and landowners to include the likes of Sir William Wilde, Professor Samuel Haughton and Sir Richard Griffith.

Harriette home-schooled the children in their early years, but only the boys received formal education. A talented artist, Harriette painted and drew – sometimes for Henry’s publications – and was a generous and welcoming host. Though Henry attended church regularly, it was Harriette who was deeply devout, confiding her spiritual life to her diary.

Perhaps shaped by his antiquarian interests, Henry was a nationalist and supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell, who praised him for his work on Ireland’s mineral resources. Henry relied heavily on the efficient postal service to maintain contact with the wider world – and to deliver his favourite daily newspaper! And while rugged field mappers are often portrayed as indefatigable, Henry emerges as something more human – a hypochondriac – while Harriette worried deeply about how her own illnesses affected others.

This engaging portrait of the Kinahans makes an important contribution to the social history of science in nineteenth-century Ireland.